2 Broke Girls Recap: Prideful Misery Meets Fallen Pride

VF Daily has surveyed the roster of new fall shows, and will be recapping several of the more ambitious offerings. Here, Emily Gerard takes on2 Broke Girls.

CBS’s 2 Broke Girlswants to be a show for smart girls, and it wants to give them license to revel in a somewhat dumb sitcom, like a hot guy you hate yourself for being vapid enough to lust after. (See later relevant plot twist.) But this pilot episode was too much of a hodgepodge to know whether smart will ultimately win out over stupid—always a bad bet when it comes to female audiences and network television.

In the beginning of the episode, when an obnoxious beanie-clad hipster unthinkingly snaps his fingers to get Max’s attention, we get to see what both actress Kat Dennings and the show’s writers are capable of as she supernovas into a magnificent takedown of him and his equally douchey hipster friend. First of all, yay, ragging on hipsters! A favored pastime of hipsters! It is this kind of closeted (and perhaps meta?) self-loathing that 2 Broke Girls can capitalize on, to delightfully snarky effect.

As sassy, dirty-mouthed Max, Dennings is crude in the way that is apparently necessary in order to get lady-led entertainment aired these days, but which also already feels overdone. Blasé attitude toward semen stains? Check. Double entendres about women getting wet? Check, please.

First, there’s the whole unlikely friendship thing between the princess and the pauper(ess). Gorgeous Caroline (Beth Behrs), a less-than-winning combo of prissy and ditzy, shows up at the shithole diner where Max works looking for a job because the former just got Ponzi-ed out of her heiress’s fortune. By her own father. Caroline is about to experience restaurant life on the other side of the plate (which, for the record, this former waitress believes would be a valuable experience for everybody no matter their economic status).

She and Max have a “you are my worst nightmare/eye roll” moment and then that extends into . . . more moments. Caroline immediately squirts herself with whipped cream, has an Amelia Bedelia–esque interpretation of Max’s restaurant lingo, and generally behaves to type. I cringed when she rejected the waitress uniform for not going with her “skin tone” and then pretends to be shocked when a line cook hits on her. Like this blonde bombshell isn’t used to come-ons? The writers try to excuse these tired Paris-Hilton-from-The-Simple-Life gags by making fun of Paris Hilton for being tired. This was questionable even in 2003: it’s like making a TV show that objectifies women—in the 60s, say—while also making fun of 60s objectification of women. Oh wait, that show is on NBC.

The writers don’t seem to get that the topical tropes they take aim at were by their nature not cool as soon as they became a thing. Ponzi schemes. Schwarzenegger and the maid. Even the hipster bashing. All made their way into the pilot and all are dangerously close to the wrong side of getting old, if we are being generous, and I’m not sure I’m in the mood.

For me, the much criticized laugh track wasn’t as distracting as being able to see so clearly what this show wants to be, and how much it overshoots the mark. It’s just not a very sophisticated take, at least not yet, on what it’s like to be young and broke and thus not to see the future as all bright and shiny like it should be. The world of the show is populated by sadly recycled sitcom characters—like poor S.N.L. alum Garrett Morris’s wise, call-it-like-it-is black man—just as a subway gag seems to have been taken straight from pre-Giuliani-era Seinfeld.

Yet the show accomplished some zingers and very funny original moments (I’ve never been afraid of accidentally kissing another woman on the train, but I am now), and of course the schtick is turned up to 11 in the pilot episode. It touches on class and social issues that, yes, really do plague Brooklynites (a disparate crew divided between brownstone owners and those just blocks—but worlds—away who have learned to tell the difference between a firecracker and a gunshot), and the prideful misery of the young.

Here’s what I’m into: recognizing my generation—wandering souls not yet ready to behave like grown-ups with real jobs—in this show, which has the potential to be brave. It’s about young women who are neither unrealistically glamorous nor outrageously trashy, neither Gossip Girl nor Jersey Shore. And, even cooler, it features a normal-size, decidedly un-lithe female heroine whose weight is not a punch line or part of the plot in any way. (Not even when she busts her boyfriend, spectacular model Noah Mills, for blithely cheating on her.) I loved that. Her totally-average-for-a-real-person-which-is-in-fact-what-she’s-playing weight is not acknowledged as being a thing, because that would make it a thing.

But here’s what I’m afraid of: that 2 Broke Girls, which was positioned to have its finger on a cultural pulse, will be bogged down by writing that is tragically behind the curve. The trouble is even in the details—Max would be making pies, not cupcakes, and she wouldn’t be caught dead with a Starbucks iced chai. (Any self-hating hipster will tell you she would spend those five hard-earned tip dollars on Stumptown roast.) Hopefully the subsequent episodes—written later than the pilot—will catch up a bit on the little things, and a lot on the larger ones.